Maryland General Assembly

• 1. Introduction

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  The Maryland General Assembly has been meeting in Annapolis since long before the United States existed, making it one of the oldest legislative bodies in the Western Hemisphere. Today it gathers inside the State House, a building that watched American democracy take its first uncertain steps. But the Assembly's story begins not with independence, but with a single lord who owned every acre of the province and answered to no one.

  How did an institution born under absolute rule become a fully functioning democratic legislature? How does a body of 188 elected members turn thousands of proposed laws into actual policy every single year? And what does it mean that this Assembly once went nearly a century without giving its growing cities a meaningful voice?

  Those are the questions this documentary will answer. Along the way, you will hear about a remarkable act of colonial self-governance from 1639, a structure drawn up in 1972 that still shapes Maryland politics today, and a pandemic that forced lawmakers to do something they had not done since the Civil War.

• 2. A Lord, a Charter, and a Colony

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  Lord Baltimore held a kind of power that is almost impossible to imagine today. Maryland's foundational charter made him the Palatine lord of the province, granting him direct ownership of all the land it described and absolute authority over everyone living on it.

  Yet British political culture proved stubbornly portable. Even under a ruler with such sweeping powers, colonists began recreating the institutions they knew from home. The Maryland General Assembly took shape as a rough equivalent of the House of Commons, giving free men of the province a place to raise their concerns.

  The rules for who could participate were spelled out in an early act. Every member of the Council of the Province, every gentleman of sufficient judgment summoned by writ, and the lord of every manor once manors were established, could take a seat in the General Assembly. Each of the hundreds, the local administrative units, could send two or more able men chosen by the freemen of that area.

  Even so, Lord Baltimore retained the right to summon any additional delegates he chose. The arrangement was participatory but not fully democratic. In 1639, with Parliament back in England having gone unassembled for a full decade, the free men of Maryland decided they needed a firmer guarantee. They passed a law requiring that assemblies be called at least once every three years, ensuring that no lord could simply ignore them indefinitely.

  The colonial Assembly survived until the American Revolution, when it gave way to the modern institution that replaced it. What came next would take centuries to perfect, and in some ways the perfecting is still underway.

• 3. Locked Out of Power

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  Starting in 1867, something went quietly wrong with Maryland's legislature. The population of Baltimore and other urban areas began climbing, but the Assembly refused to allocate those cities more seats to reflect their growth.

  By 1918, the numbers told a damning story. Baltimore's population had grown by 175 percent. The state as a whole had grown by 46 percent. Yet through all of that expansion, not a single seat was reallocated to match the new reality. Rural districts held power that their shrinking share of the population no longer justified, while the hundreds of thousands of city residents found their votes worth a fraction of those cast in the countryside.

  This imbalance persisted for decades. It was not corrected until the legislative apportionment plan of 1972, a Constitutional amendment that created the 47 legislative districts still in use today. Many of those districts cross county boundaries deliberately, the idea being to produce districts roughly equal in population rather than ones that simply follow old county lines.

  Each of the 47 districts elects one senator and three delegates. In most districts the three delegates run at large from the whole district, with voters casting votes for up to three candidates simultaneously, a system called block voting. In thinly populated parts of the state, the district is sometimes divided into subdistricts instead: either three single-delegate subdistricts or one two-delegate subdistrict paired with one single-delegate subdistrict.

  The apportionment plan gets revisited every ten years, following each decennial U.S. census, keeping the population balance from drifting too far out of alignment again.

• 4. Two Chambers, One Purpose

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  Forty-seven senators sit in the upper chamber and 141 delegates sit in the lower, making the Maryland General Assembly a bicameral body with 188 elected members in total. Both senators and delegates serve four-year terms, and neither house imposes term limits on its members.

  To serve in either chamber, a candidate must be a U.S. citizen and a Maryland resident for at least a year before the election. The candidate must also have lived in the specific district they seek to represent for the six months immediately before the election. A senator must be at least 25 years old; a delegate must be at least 21. Military officers on active duty, other than reservists, are not eligible for election.

  The Senate is led by a President and the House by a Speaker. Both officers wield considerable influence: they appoint the members of most committees, name committee chairs and vice-chairs, preside over daily sessions, and decide points of order when disputes arise. When a new bill is introduced, it is the President or the Speaker who assigns it to the appropriate standing committee.

  One notable exception is the Joint Committee on Investigation, whose members elect their own officers rather than receiving appointments from the chamber leaders. The president pro tempore separately appoints the majority and minority whips and leaders.

  When a vacancy opens in either house through death, resignation, or disqualification, the Governor fills it by appointment. The replacement's name must be submitted by the State Central Committee of the same political party as the departing legislator, preserving the partisan balance of the seat.

• 5. How a Bill Becomes Law

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  Every year the Maryland General Assembly convenes for exactly 90 days, and in that window it must act on more than 2,300 bills, including the state's annual budget. The 446th session opened on the 10th of January 2024.

  A bill begins as an idea in the mind of a senator or delegate, who sends it to the Department of Legislative Services' bill-drafting division. That office turns the idea into formal legislative language and returns it to the sponsoring legislator. When the bill is introduced on the chamber floor, its number, its sponsor's name, and its descriptive title are read aloud. House Bills are numbered HB followed by a sequential number, Senate Bills are numbered SB, and the count resets to one at the start of each new session.

  After that first reading, the presiding officer sends the bill to a standing committee that handles its subject area. Notice of the hearing is published in the Maryland Register so that any member of the public who wishes to testify can do so. The sponsor presents the bill to the committee, supporters and opponents offer testimony, and the committee ultimately votes on whether to send the bill forward, with or without amendments. A majority of the full committee membership is required.

  If the committee passes the bill, it goes back to the chamber floor for a second reading. Legislators who were not on the committee can offer amendments at this stage. After amendments are resolved, the bill is printed for a third reading, which ends in a roll call vote. Ordinary bills pass with a simple majority. Emergency bills and Constitutional amendments each require a three-fifths majority.

  A bill that clears the first chamber then travels to the other and repeats the entire sequence: committee, second reading, third reading. If the second chamber passes the bill unchanged, it goes directly to the Governor's desk. If the second chamber amends it, the bill returns to its house of origin, which can accept the changes or send the bill to a conference committee of three members from each house. That committee drafts a report; if both chambers adopt it, the bill goes to a final vote in each house. If either chamber rejects the report, the bill dies.

  All bills passed in a regular session, with two exceptions, must reach the Governor within twenty days of adjournment. The Governor then has thirty days to sign or veto. A veto sends the bill back to the house of origin, where a three-fifths vote of both chambers can override it. Laws passed in a regular session ordinarily take effect on the 1st of October of the same year, while emergency bills take effect the moment the Governor signs them.

• 6. The Budget and the Pandemic

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  Maryland's annual budget occupies a unique position in the Assembly's procedures. Unlike every other piece of legislation, the budget bill becomes law the moment it receives final passage from both chambers. The Governor cannot veto it. This means the budget is effectively the one piece of business the legislature controls outright, with no executive check at the final stage.

  Constitutional amendments follow a different path entirely. Like the budget, a constitutional amendment cannot be vetoed by the Governor. But it does not become law on passage. Instead it is placed before the voters at the next general election, where it requires ratification to take effect.

  Every session must conclude with the budget passed before the Assembly adjourns sine die, the formal term for adjourning without setting a date to reconvene. The 90-day clock is real, and the budget must be done before it runs out.

  In March 2020, that calendar was overridden for the first time in roughly 160 years. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the General Assembly to adjourn early on the 18th of March 2020, the first such interruption since the Civil War. The comparison to the Civil War is not a casual one. It signals how rare and serious the disruption was, a body that had met through world wars and economic crises finally brought to an early halt by a public health emergency.

  When the Assembly reconvened the following year, the 90-day structure returned. And the bills kept coming: more than 2,300 of them each session, waiting to move through a process that traces its outline all the way back to a colonial assembly that first demanded the right to meet in 1639.